In the 24 years since the birth of Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby, thousands of would-be parents have been assured that as far as scientists knew there was no extra risk of genetic damage associated with in-vitro fertilization, or IVF. No matter how sperm meets egg--whether in a woman's body or in a Petri dish (and even if the sperm needs some help getting inside the egg)--nature is equally vigilant about preventing serious genetic mishaps from coming to term. With those assurances, test-tube births have soared from a few hundred a year in the early 1980s to tens of...
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